Why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its ancestry? The reason is not difficult to discover. It found a place for itself ready made in nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by various forms of life from adjacent but still distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then, was a great opportunity for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot, with true business instinct, saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and took to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural consequence that those forms survived which were dingy in color. Unlike the owls, however, the owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and other creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground bird; and as it feeds at night in a country possessing no native beasts of prey, it has almost lost the power of flight, and uses its wings only as a sort of parachute to break its fall in descending from a rock or a tree to its accustomed feeding-ground. To ascend a steep place or a tree, it climbs, parrot-like, with its hooked claws, up the surface of the trunk or the face of the precipice. Even more aberrant in its ways, however, than the burrowing owl-parrot, is that other strange and hated New Zealand lory, the kea, which, alone among its kind, has adjured the gentle ancestral vegetarianism of the cockatoos and macaws, in favor of a carnivorous diet of remarkable ferocity. And what is stranger still, this evil habit has been developed in the kea since the colonization of New Zealand by the British, the most demoralizing of new-comers, as far as all aborigines are concerned. The English settlers have taught the Maori to wear silk hats and to drink strong liquors, and they have thrown temptation in the way of even the once innocent native parrot. Before the white man came, the kea was a mild-mannered, fruit-eating or honey-sucking bird. But as soon as sheep-stations were established on the island these degenerate parrots began to acquire a distinct taste for raw mutton. At first they ate only the offal that was thrown out from the slaughter-houses, picking the bones as clean of meat as a dog or a jackal. But in course of time, as the taste for blood grew, a new and debased idea entered their heads. If dead sheep are good to eat, are not living ones? The keas, having pondered deeply over this abstruse problem, solved it in the affirmative. Proceeding to act upon their convictions, they invented a truly hideous mode of procedure. A number of birds hunt out a weakly member of a flock, almost always after dark. The sheep is worried to death by the combined efforts of the parrots, some of whom perch themselves upon the animal’s back and tear open the flesh, their object being to reach the kidneys, which they devour at the earliest possible moment. As many as two hundred ewes are said to have been killed in a